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UBITECH undertakes the coordination of the ICARUS Innovation Action on aviation-based data value chain implementation for diversified global and local operations

UBITECH is hosting the kick-off meeting, in Athens, Greece (January 16-17, 2018) of the ICARUS Big Data Value PPP Innovation Action, officially started on January 1st, 2018– undertaking the consortium management and coordination of the research project’s activities. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 780792) and spans on the period January 2018 – December 2020. The ICARUS project aims to build a novel data value chain in the aviation-related sectors towards data-driven innovation and collaboration across currently diversified and fragmented industry players, acting as multiplier of the “combined” data value that can be accrued, shared and traded, and rejuvenating the existing, increasingly non-linear models / processes in aviation.

Using methods such as big data analytics, deep learning, semantic data enrichment, and blockchain powered data sharing, ICARUS will address critical barriers for the adoption of Big Data in the aviation industry (e.g. data fragmentation, data provenance, data licensing and ownership, data veracity), and will enable aviation-related big data scenarios for EU-based companies, organizations and scientists, through a multi-sided platform that will allow exploration, curation, integration and deep analysis of original, synthesized and derivative data characterized by different velocity, variety and volume in a trusted and fair manner.

ICARUS will bring together the Aerospace, Tourism, Health, Security, Transport, Retail, Weather, and Public sectors and accelerate their data-driven collaboration under the prism of a novel aviation-driven data value chain. Representative use cases of the overall domain’s value chain include: (i) sophisticated passenger handling mechanisms and personalised services on ground facilities, (ii) enhanced routes analysis of aircrafts for improved fuel consumption optimisation and pollution awareness, (iii) more accurate and realistic prediction model of epidemics, and (iv) novel passenger experiences prein- and post- flight.

Within ICARUS, UBITECH will be responsible for the overall project management and consortium coordination, as well as for the architectural design and continuous integration of the final platform. Moreover, UBITECH R&D team will drive the design of a novel framework that leverages data, primary or secondarily related to the aviation domain, coming from diverse sources (data APIs, historical data, statistics, sensor / IoT data, weather data, and various other open data sources) to help companies and organisations whose operations are directly or indirectly linked to aviation to simultaneously enhance their data reach, as well as share and/or trade their existing data sources and intelligence, in order to gain better insights into airplanes’, airports’ and passengers’ quantified selves and contribute to improving their operations whether in real time or “offline” and increasing passengers’ safety and satisfaction.

Finally, UBITECH will drive the implementation of (a) the Data Collection Services Bundle, mining, semantically annotating, transforming and checking in the collected data in the ICARUS data lake, ensuring the integrity and veracity of the data; (b) the Data Curation and Linking Services Bundle, encompassing data filtering, cleaning, normalization, modelling and mapping to a standardised data schema, translation, indexing and smart linking to existing datasets under linked open data repositories following the linked data principles; and (c) the Data Analytics Services Bundle that essentially correlates and analyses data to generate new insights and knowledge, incorporating typical machine learning techniques, such as regressions, support vector machines and k-means clustering, deep learning algorithms and prescriptive analytics.